Perfect Sight
by beenworkingonacoktail
Summary: A series of drabbles and one-shots spurred from stray ideas related to the TRC plot. Until now all of them are related to Fai, Kurogane, or their pairing, though the focus might eventually stray
1. Perfect sight

**Title**: Perfect Sight  
**Pairing**: Kurogane x Fai  
**Words**: 678  
**Rating**: PG-13  
**Genre**: *cries* I have no clue. None. It's not angst or drama, I'll give you that.  
**Spoilers**: Everything until and including the Clow arc  
**Disclaimer**: I own nothing; CLAMP does. Isn't that lovely?

**Summary/Notes**: Future-fic; Fai ponders about hitsuzen, in hindsight

Furthermore, the fic assumes Kurogane and Fai settle in Nihon (and that Yuuko's still in existence, though that would only really affect a tense) and that, while the male bonding is going strong, they're not quite _there_ yet (I have a thing for the period of time just _before_ a relationship officially begins, and am secretly enamored and amused by the idea that the two of them would carry on in the same way for months and months before realizing _It_ and doing something about it)

It doesn't say much, but it does address a few ideas/images that have been stuck in my head for a while now, and I'm glad to finally let them out ^^;;

* * *

"…and the only reason you could drag me out of Celes (Fai bites off the comment about how much his knees had screamed at that; it's far too flippant, now) was the fact that I'd sealed Souhi in your hand a few hours before."

"…And?"

The room is dark, and Fai couldn't have seen from three, four feet away, but he's sure Kurogane's raised an eyebrow.

"And the sheer _chance_ of it," here he lowers his voice, weighs it down with feigned gloom, "_chilled me to the very bone_." He brightens up again, easy and quick: "I only realized it yesterday; high winter and all that," he grins, "and I still felt the shiver. Clearly."

"That's corny." Kurogane's voice is flat. Is there a smirk in there? Maybe a half-formed frown.

Fai's grin relaxes down into a thoughtful smile. "Very much so," he says, "but it _is_ true." He takes a breath– "Our journey always hanged on a thin thread; or many tiny threads that had to meet _just_ _right_ – trying to track them all would make your mind stumble and freeze."

"Is your mind frozen up yet?" A lazy drawl, entirely alert.

"Not yet," Fai smiles, "though soon it might be – I have a lot of free time on my hands."

"I'll see Tomoyo first thing in the morning about your flimsy duty roster," the answer comes, and Kurogane _must_ be smirking now.

Fai looks up through deep shadows, feels content. It's a little surprising how easily they talk at this late hour, just as they're going to sleep. Fai thinks they're in the process of making it a habit – he quite likes the idea.

"And I was also only able to get you through that barrier," Kurogane goes on, making Fai blink, "because Tomoyo went and told me how to do it.

"Though I had to be just the right amount of dead for it to happen."

Fai winces. Then he tries to work out, again, just how much Ashura-ou had known (because he'd had to fire that spell _just right_; and his last words had made Fai wonder).

"And later," he picks up the thread, "I could trade for your arm only because I had the vampire blood." Tit for tat, then and now alike. The world is made of balance. "Also, I could fight back against Reed's minions (Fai almost jokes about the word; it would have been appropriate, another time) – the rest of my magic would have been useless at the time." Just deadly to himself, in fact, but that would have defied the purpose of Kurogane trading for his life, twice, and would have gone against-- well, everything.

"Why are you bringing this up _now_?" And Kurogane's definitely frowning this time.

Fai smiles into the dark again. He wonders how cheer comes so easily to him, even though he's not trying to hide anything anymore (the opposite, in fact). It must be who he really is; or part of it, at least.

"No reason. I realised this yesterday, and-" _tried very hard not to panic, in hindsight_.

There is a pause.

"Yuuko-san said that there is hitsuzen, and things happen according to a plan, but that our own choices matter more, leading to futures of their own. But every choice has a result, and the inevitable will weave on from there – so what's the difference between one and the other?"

"Whose will you're following, yours or another's," Kurogane says, no pause for thought, no warning, and Fai blinks once again.

Huh.

_That is… almost too simple._ But-

The room is warm and pleasant. The night is silent except for the winds. Above, he can barely make out the long beams of the wooden ceiling.

"Would you believe this has been bothering me since yesterday?"

"Yes." _It sounds like you_ remains unsaid.

Fai smiles. He pauses once again. Then,

"I wonder how Yuuko-san manages."

"…Sake. Lots of it."

"Right."

And after that they sleep.

The next morning the sun shines low and pale, but the bright snow makes up for it.

* * *

**A/N 2**: Um. If you're wondering why they're sharing a room despite not being outwardly an item yet, it's because it's become a sort of habit and now it seems a bit strange not to have a room-mate at night… and I might actually write something about that very thing one of these days, if more plot-bunnies settle around the idea.


	2. Spur of the moment

**Title**: Spur of the moment**  
Pairing/Characters**: Kurogane x Fai vaguely implied. young!Tomoyo, young!Kurogane**  
Words**: 345**  
Rating**: PG**  
Genre**: I can't pick these out for the life of me.**  
Spoilers**: bits of Kurogane's backstory and the events in Tokyo**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own anything. At all.

**Summary**: I take the liberty of implying that Kurogane's oath of loyalty to Tomoyo actually _clicks_ a little later. Tokyo is brought up as well. Parallels are drawn, 'cause I love them.

* * *

Kurogane has never had a brother or a sister or anybody younger than him to take care of as a boy. That's why the first child he ever takes in his arms to hold is a young, sleep-ridden Tomoyo.

He finds her curled up among scrolls one lazy summer afternoon, the silk of her long robes spread out around her in deep waves, covered in rolls of paper. It's been a long, tiresome day of study, in which she hasn't seen the sun since bright early that morning.

When he picks her up she is surprisingly heavy, weighed down by the elaborate clothes. her tiny hands, the ones that stopped him in his rage not long ago, curl gently in his shirt. She barely stirs.

Walking carefully down the hallways to her room, Kurogane feels that he's carrying something precious; she is so very small and kind, and bears so great a power. And it is on that afternoon, during that walk, that he truly decides to keep her far from harm. It is a promise to himself that holds more weight than the words he'd spoken to her a few short months ago, and so alike his wish to help protect his parents and his people.

He vows not to let what happened in Suwa ever take place again, no matter what he has to do. And from then on his heart is set.

***

Years later, when he picks the mage up in the emptied reservoir, half-dead and painfully, startlingly light, he makes up his mind in a moment.

(It's why the man's request that they just let him die enrages him - that the person he'd set out to protect, however privately, would just give up like that feels like some kind of a betrayal, a breach of contract, even if there's no such agreement standing; so Kurogane goes over Fai's wishes just like Fai wanted to ignore their own, and he sees to it that the mage does live, by any means, because that day he had decided that he would.)

* * *

**A/N**: And this fic came from me realising with startling clarity a few days ago that the way Kurogane's holding blacked-out!Fai in Tokyo is the way you would hold a baby (courtesy of my brother-in-law carrying my two-year-old nephew like that in front of me), and I have a feeling that I've read this comparison somewhere before, but a few days ago is when it really _clicked_. Add in a stray thought about a liege-lord's responsibility to his vassal in response to the vassal's services (and turn it around to fit; a lot) and the fic's made XD

Also, just pretend that Tomoyo's old enough to read kana (though I imagine she is, even several kanji) and that information that she would study at that age would be written down in simplified writing just for her (why wouldn't it be? She's the Empress' sister, special measures can be taken just for her ^^ And she could always have been studying the kanji themselves...)


	3. Coming home

**Title**: Coming home  
**Pairing: **Kurogane x Fai  
**Words**: 124  
**Rating**: PG  
**Genre**: Not angst, not too romantic either, no drama, no action... you know, general stuff...  
**Spoilers**: Fai's backstory as revealed in Celes  
**Disclaimer**: I don't own anything. At all.

**Summary**: Post-series. A short conversation between Kurogane and Fai. Assumes, as I always like to do, that Fai settles in Nihon when everything is over.

**A/N**: I've always wondered what happened to the people of Celes. Maybe I skipped some details here and there, but it was never clear to me whether they'd left for another country in the world of Celes (and therefore perished when the world was destroyed) or they actually moved to another world (in which case, who sent them there? Ashura himself after he woke up? Did they have another wizard in court who could do that? But never mind...) And I wondered if Fai wondered about it. And therefore, fic.

* * *

"_All of these country's inhabitants are gone. They've fled to another one." Ashura-ou, chapter 163_

_***  
_

"Ever thought of finding your people?" Kurogane asks one clouded, cool spring day.

"I wouldn't know where to look," Fai answers. "And... I think I'd be afraid to. All this time I thought that what had happened in Celes had somehow been my fault, and even now the thought comes up sometimes." He smiles at Kurogane's frown - _Don't worry_. "And why go when I couldn't stay? My place is here now. And they do not need me."

"But we do?" Kurogane drawls, looking entirely too doubtful.

"Don't you?"

The answer doesn't come, but Fai doesn't expect it, either. The silence is filled, fittingly enough, by birds calling out their arrival home. And Fai is quite happy right then with the small workings of fate.

* * *


	4. When in fact

**Title**: When in fact  
**Pairing**: Kurogane x Fai  
**Words**: 150  
**Rating**: PG  
**Genre**: Introspective? Trying to be deep?  
**Spoilers**: None (though there's one for Chapter 211 in the A/N at the bottom ^^)  
**Disclaimer**: I don't own anything. At all.  
**Summary**: One take on the fuzzy romantic mushy feelings between Kurogane and Fai

* * *

They are not better persons because of each other alone.

Kurogane learned and remembered what he had to by himself, and if there was something to drive him it was the both the mage and the children, and everything they all went through together. The same people refused to let Fai stumble for too long, but when he did stand up he did so on his own. Ultimately, they both found salvation in their own hearts.

They might not even love each other in any conventional way. There is no ever-aching need between them, and one could live without the other if that is what they had to do. They just choose not to, because it's better this way.

If they are bound, it is through understanding; the history they've built, the giving and the taking, the trust they've grown into. And this, to them, means so much more.

* * *

**A/N**: This particular sort-of-rant came from me remembering a few not so great fics I'd read before, where Fai and Kurogane are madly and passionately in love, can't live without each other, and owe their entire character development to each other alone. Yeah. I think of the weirdest things sometimes, right?

Also, I really really wanted to use "it's better this way" in the fic, because of a Sarah McLachlan song I think about when I hear that sentence ('Full of Grace'), which is really beautifully sung (the woman can definitely pull at my heartstrings), and which makes me smirk in a little bitter-sweet way, because even if that particular verse makes me think about the interpretation above, it's actually saying that the couple referred to in the song is better off _apart_.

Furthermore, you have no idea how much I had to keep from adding one little sentence in this drabble, like so:

One could live without the other if that is what they had to do – _it's even physically possible now that Fai's got back to normal –_ but it would have ruined the whole I'm-being-so-serious-and-deep mood. *cracks up*

Aaaand now the author notes are really longer than the fic XD


	5. Obviously

**Title**: Obviously  
**Pairing**: Kurogane x Fai  
**Words**: 605  
**Rating**: PG  
**Genre**: Fun. Should not be taken completely seriously.  
**Spoilers**: for everything that is revealed in the Clow arc  
**Disclaimer**: I own nothing; Clamp does. Isn't that lovely?  
**Summary**: His mother, Tomoyo, Souma and Amaterasu were the four female role-models that Kurogane grew up with, so it should come as no surprise that he managed, somehow, to fall for Fai.

**A/N**: This was written on the train-ride back home (and back to my comp, oh, the joy!), completely on a whim – I was reading this detective-novel set in Japan's Heian period, in which one of the characters expressed the generally accepted opinion that, quote, "women ought to be gentle, pleasant, frail-looking things, which should submit to the will of men." Naturally, I thought of Clamp's Nihon, and the number of women who don't fit that particular mould. Therefore, fic.

Again, since this lovely site is mean to me and won't allow strikethoroughs, I've had to resort to this: **_(nice interesting things that should be under a strikethrough but can't; they are very sad because of it ^^;;) _**They're not so many or all that important this time around, so the fic can be savoured here as well.

* * *

Although it wasn't all that common, (considering several everyday examples), and the fact that few people actually thought of it as accurate or just, there was a general thought in Nihon that women ought to be gentle, pleasant, frail-looking things, which should submit to the will of men.

Well.

Kurogane's mother had been a gentle, pleasant, frail-looking woman, with a will of steel coated in silk and a frightful temper the few times when she let herself be angered.

Tomoyo looked frail, though mostly due to her age, and she was pleasant, and she was gentle, but there was nothing weak about her will, or whims (Kurogane should know).

Souma looked anything but frail and gentle, she had no time to act pleasant, and she only submitted to Tomoyo or the Empress herself.

And Amaterasu _was_ the Empress. Enough said.

Whether he liked it or not, these were the four female role-models that Kurogane grew up with, which subconsciously influenced his perception on the qualities he should look for in a woman to admire, therefore potential love-interest, therefore potential wife.

So it should come as no surprise that he managed, somehow, to **_(start)_** end up falling for Fai.

The man was gentle, no doubt, that was a great part of his nature (something brought out even more by the very few/quite numerous (depending on who he was dealing with) times when he was decidedly _not_), you could say he was inherently pleasant (just not to Kurogane, but whatever. Tomoyo or Souma or Amaterasu weren't pleasant at all to him (not that he'd want them to be, he'd get bored), so there, it fit) and he _was_ a frail-looking thing, until you took a good, knowing look at him, or saw him kicking someone's ass (having watched him for a while, _and_ fought alongside him, Kurogane was the absolute best judge for that), and you couldn't find a more headstrong, mule-headed **_(person)_** idiot in all the worlds, whether the stubbornness was hurdled at your face or cunningly hidden in the strangest, most varied crock.

So, obviously, it made perfect sense. Kurogane'd never stood a chance. Nope, not a one. (hiccup) Or maybe not, maybe these are all crazy, baseless thoughts brought on by (hiccup) drink. Could be, the world is pretty fuzzy. (Damn. How the hell did he get drunk? He didn't even drink all that much – just that congratulatory toast in the princess' health (the first princess…. no, second, at least as far as _he's_ concerned) and then the kid's (the other kid, that is) and then for the other kid and princess, wherever they might be, and then the kid's (first one… second…? first one in order of the _toasts_) parents, and then for them (one for him, one for the mage) and then three or four for the Witch, maybe one or two for the meat bun, and oh yeah, there definitely had been one for the black-haired kid that had to do with the first… second… _other_ kid, and for the black-haired kid's black-haired friend, and for that friend's grandfather (when had it turned into a family reunion, that's what he'd like to know), and damn, Clow-country's alcohol must really be some strong stuff!)

Yeah.

Anyway.

Doesn't matter.

Kurogane has more important things to do right now. Like finding that mage and having a little chat. If he can string a sentence together, that is. If he can't, he's sure he can think of something. They've been stuck together in Shura for six months without being able to understand each other, he can be quite expressive when he has to.

Heh.

(hiccup)

* * *


	6. You've got it all wrong

**Title**: You've got it all wrong  
**Pairing**: Kurogane x Fai  
**Words**: 140  
**Rating**: PG  
**Genre**: It's 140 words long; are you _kidding_?  
**Spoilers**: none  
**Disclaimer**: I own nothing; Clamp does. Isn't that lovely?

**A/N**: Post-series. Assumes, like I always do, that Fai and Kurogane settle together in Nihon in the end.

The idea shimmied my way after I caught the last part of Rob Thomas' "Lonely no more" on the radio today, specifically the lyric "_What if I gave all my life to find some way to stand beside you_," which I've always had a thing for. Because I'm a silly fangirl, I made the connection. And then I realised that _it was all wrong_ XD

* * *

"You know, Kuro-sama," Fai said one autumn evening, "you have a slightly skewed interpretation of your country's tales."

"Hnn?" Kurogane rumbled, head resting on the pillow and half-asleep already.

Fai carefully picked up one of the many paper scrolls that were unfolded in his lap.

"It says right here – everywhere, really – that the brave heroes of the story would often go to extraordinary lengths, at times almost bargaining away their lives, for a chance to stand beside the person they cared for."

"…And?" Kurogane asked, sounding a little wary (this was Fai; anything could happen).

"Well, you did go to extraordinary lengths, quite a few times, in fact, and you have my eternal, not-entirely-grudging gratitude for it; but it was all so _I_ could stand beside _you_."

Kurogane blinked.

And then he said, "Whatever works," and Fai began to cackle.

* * *

**A/N 2**: Fai's reading Nihon fairy-tales because he wants to know the culture. He reads them at _night_ because (he thinks it's funny) he doesn't have the time during the day.


End file.
